Greetings. Welcome to the Guidewire first quarter and fiscal 2023 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Alex Hughes. You may begin.
Thank you, operator. I'm Alex Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me today is Mike Rosenbaum, Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Cooper, Chief Financial Officer. A complete disclosure of our results can be found in our press release issued today, as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC, both of which are available on our investor relations section of our website. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay will be available following the call. Statements made on the call today include forward-looking ones regarding our financial results, products, customer demand, operations, the impact of local, national, and geopolitical events, and our business and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are based on management's current expectations as of today, and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date.
Please refer to the press release and the risk factors and documents we file with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC, for information on risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. We also will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. All commentary on margins, profitability, and expenses are on non-GAAP basis, unless stated otherwise. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is provided in our press release. Reconciliations and additional data are also posted in the supplement on our IR website. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike.
Thank you, Alex. Good afternoon, everyone, thanks very much for joining us today. We're off to a solid start in the fiscal year, with steady and consistent execution towards our goal to modernize the technology platforms supporting the global property and casualty insurance industry. ARR and subscription revenue both finished ahead of our expectations, notably, subscription and support growth margin came in better than our expectations. You have heard me say before that we feel privileged to serve a critical and essential industry, one that helps families and businesses manage risks so that they can better plan and grow. Insurers need an agile core platform that effectively engages consumers, that supports faster innovation with new products and distribution channels, and that enables them to grow efficiently.
Guidewire Cloud Platform delivers this agility, and I'm pleased to share the progress we continue to make in expanding its depth, adoption, and deployment. The momentum around Guidewire, our ecosystem, and our cloud platform was on full display at our recent Connections conference held in October in Las Vegas. With nearly 2,800 people attending in person, we saw record attendance more than doubling from the prior year and representing broad participation across customer segments, partners, and regions of the world. At Connections, we announced Flaine, our sixth platform release. Flaine builds on our previous releases to deliver improved self-service tooling for faster production deployments and introduces a new approach to release updates.
Cloud customers can now update their implementations to new releases far more easily, which will structurally change how customers approach upgrades, allowing them to stay on the latest Guidewire version and take advantage of platform and application innovation more continuously. We also released our digital framework, Jutro, which enables customers to launch new digital experiences built on InsuranceSuite quickly and easily. Together, these product capabilities provide much greater speed and agility to our customers and help us manage our customers' cloud deployments far more efficiently. The real highlight of Connections was hearing customers share their cloud visions, journeys, and outcomes with Guidewire. USAA, which has served U.S. veterans and their families for 100 years and has over 13 million members, is halfway through a multi-year modernization journey to increase engagement, innovation, and efficient growth. Guidewire Cloud Platform is a key foundation of this journey.
Already, USAA has been able to introduce a touchless claims experience for members and launched its new small business insurance line of business in less than nine months. Tryg, the largest property and casualty insurer in Scandinavia with over 5 million customers, moved to Guidewire Cloud Platform with the goal of fully automating the claims process to further drive efficiency and customer satisfaction. Tryg has already been able to reduce the amount of time spent per claim by 26% and the percentage of claims leakage by 58%, while also significantly increasing customer satisfaction. Aioi Insurance, part of Nissay Dowa Insurance, the eight- largest insurer in the world, was able to replace its core system with Guidewire Cloud Platform in 12 months and achieved greater flexibility, security, and optimization.
They were able to double their new business capacity by reducing manual steps and cutting claims acceptance time in half. As we continue to increase platform maturity with each release, we are driving healthy adoption across existing and new customers. Over 20% of our core InsuranceSuite customer base has already adopted Guidewire Cloud Platform, and we added another four cloud wins in the first quarter. Vaudoise Group, a Swiss Tier 2 insurer founded over 125 years ago, chose to upgrade to InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud Platform for a major part of its book of business to achieve greater operational excellence. Vaudoise Group initially adopted InsuranceSuite self-managed, but before deploying, elected to upgrade to Guidewire Cloud. Santa Lucía S.A., a Tier 2 insurer in Spain, selected InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud Platform for their largest line of business, funeral insurance and end-of-life support.
Santa Lucía decided to modernize policy, claims, and billing on GWCP because of our market-leading presence, combined with our platform adaptability and flexibility. This is our first InsuranceSuite cloud customer in Spain, and we're excited about the future potential in this market. Builders, a mid-size mutual insurer specializing in workers' compensation and construction, operating in 22 states, selected full InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud Platform to replace their legacy mainframe-based system and to establish a new technology framework that improves their customers' experience, increases productivity, and supports future growth. Finally, RBOS Farm Mutual Insurance, based in Texas, adopted InsuranceNow for its functionality, configuration, upgradability, and self-service capabilities. In addition to these cloud decisions, we also saw three insurers, including one in Japan and one in South Africa, opt to begin a modernization with Guidewire on-prem.
While the vast majority of sales activity over the past few years has been cloud, we do see cases where an insurer decides it makes sense to begin on-prem. Our technical approach facilitates this path, and our perspective is that as long as the customers understand the strategic direction we are following and acknowledge that an eventual transition to cloud will come, we can support this approach. In one of the deals, an existing Tier 1 on-prem ClaimCenter customer selected PolicyCenter for a new modernization project to support specialty lines. In another, the selection was based on the native integration of data and analytics into ClaimCenter, which will enable the creation of a better claims experience through real-time modeling and targeted straight-through processing. This example supports our strategy to deliver a fully modernized core platform with data and analytics embedded throughout the insurance life cycle.
We also saw HazardHub continue to accelerate in the quarter. This was highlighted by a meaningful deal at Frontline Insurance Company, a large home and commercial property insurer operating in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Frontline will use HazardHub's granular risk scoring for their direct-to-consumer business, Open House, to inform customer acquisition and core underwriting strategies. We are very pleased with the continued success of this product, as it offers us a new, faster sales cycle and a more flow-based business that might, in the future, complement our core system sales dynamic. Turning to operations. At Analyst Day, we talked about our focus on driving improved platform efficiency as we expand breadth and adoption. In the first quarter, this translated into progress in subscription and support gross margins.
This is an area we will continue to stay focused on and expect to improve steadily as we deploy more customers in the cloud, roll out new self-service capabilities, and generally improve the efficiency of our cloud platform. At the same time, always continuing to ensure that our customer implementations are resourced and managed to ensure that the greatest possible degree of success. In the first quarter, we executed a number of new InsuranceSuite production deployments on Guidewire Cloud Platform, including Definity Insurance, a Tier 2 insurer in Canada known for industry-leading innovation, a two-time winner of Guidewire's Innovation Award, migrated to Guidewire Cloud Platform with over $2.5 billion in personal lines in production. Already, it is seeing 40% faster consumer transactions, 12% faster broker transactions, and an 8% increase in quote volume.
We also saw a Tier 2 insurer with over 90 years of history offering auto, homeowners, and other personal lines to members in 23 states go live with ClaimCenter on Guidewire Cloud Platform. This deployment lays a strong foundation to build on as this customer embarks on further transformation. A large farm mutual insurer in Texas went live with InsuranceSuite on Guidewire Cloud Platform. This is a company with over 100 years in operation. Guidewire Cloud Platform will help them maximize operational efficiency as they pursue further growth. Finally, let me just close by discussing our partner community and ecosystem. Our system integrator community has been and will remain critical to our differentiation and long-term success. SIs are currently involved in over 60 Guidewire Cloud projects. Growing this total will remain a strategic focus for us.
The number of Guidewire consultants at systems integrators grew to over 20,000 at the end of Q1, up by 28% year-over-year. We also continue to see cloud momentum build in this community with the number of cloud-certified consultants sustaining growth of over 100% year-over-year and passing 5,800 at the end of Q1. This gives our customers a valuable bench of cloud-trained professionals to draw on as they start down the path of modernization or embark on cloud upgrades. We are also seeing momentum in our solution partner community. In the first quarter, 19 more solution partners joined Guidewire's Marketplace, bringing the total to nearly 180. We also announced a few important new strategic partnerships at Connections.
We partnered with One Inc, a digital payment solution for P&C insurers that offers comprehensive digital payments options and automated inbound and outbound payments. Our collaboration will make it possible for our cloud customers to deploy these solutions significantly faster than they were able to in the past. We've also partnered with Appian, a leading workflow automation platform, to enable our cloud customers to rapidly create and manage cloud-based digital experiences and business process automation. We partnered with Earnix, a leading dynamic pricing engine, to accelerate insurers' speed to market in defining, updating, and optimizing insurance products that are already in market. In summary, Q1 was a great quarter and a solid start to the fiscal year. We continue to expand our platform in critical areas. We continue to sell new modernizations and cloud upgrades.
We continue to expand our ecosystem and deliver successful production go-lives and continue to make steady progress on cloud operating efficiency. All of these critical elements of our plan that reinforce each other and demonstrate steady progress towards strategic cloud leadership in our market. With that, I'll turn it over to Jeff.
Thanks, Mike. First quarter ARR ended at $673 million ahead of our expectations. Q1 is always our slowest quarter. We were pleased to see some exciting cloud wins, most notably meaningful progress in EMEA. Total revenue was $195.3 million, just above the high end of our outlook. Cloud strength continues to be visible on subscription revenue, which was $79 million, up 38% year-over-year. Subscription and support revenue was $99.1 million, up 25% year-over-year. License revenue was $41 million, up 2% when compared to Q1 last year. Services revenue was $55.3 million, up 18%. Services revenue benefited from ongoing increases in the number of cloud implementation programs. Turning to profitability for the first quarter, which we will discuss on a non-GAAP basis, gross profit was $83 million.
Overall gross margin was 42%. All of our margin disclosure for the quarter and for the comparison periods reflect our updated allocation methodology for headcount-related costs for IT, payroll, and procurement. As a reminder, and as we discussed on our Q4 earnings call in September, we moved headcount-related costs of IT, payroll, and procurement to G&A expense. Previously, we allocated these headcount costs out to other expense lines. Subscription and support gross margin was 49%, compared to 45% a year ago. This was ahead of our expectations due to increased cloud infrastructure efficiency and slower than expected hiring. Services gross margin was -9%, compared to +10% a year ago. As discussed in prior quarters, we are working through some complex early cloud projects and have been leveraging subcontractors at higher than normal levels.
We are making steady progress through these programs and expect services to return to positive margin in the second half of the fiscal year. Operating loss was $35.9 million. This included $2.9 million of severance expense, half of which impacted sales and marketing expense. Also, as previously mentioned, G&A expenses were negatively impacted by the reallocation adjustment. This had an $11.3 million impact on G&A expenses in the quarter. Overall stock-based compensation was $35.1 million, up 9% from Q1 of last year, which is generally in line with our growth in overall compensation expense. We ended the year with $868.5 million in cash equivalents, and investments.
In Q1, our board authorized a $400 million share repurchase program, and as part of that, we initiated a $200 million accelerated share repurchase program that we expect to complete in Q3. Turning to our outlook for the fiscal year 2023, we are maintaining our ARR outlook of $745 million-$760 million. Per our usual approach, our ARR outlook assumes foreign currency exchange rates as of the end of our last fiscal year. We are adjusting our outlook for total revenue, which we now expect to be between $886 million and $896 million. The only change is we now expect subscription revenue to be $342 million, an adjustment of $2 million. All other components of revenue are largely unchanged.
Turning to margins and profitability, which we will discuss on a non-GAAP basis, we expect subscription and support gross margins to be 49% for the year, an increase of 3 percentage points when compared to our outlook last quarter. We now anticipate lower cloud infrastructure costs, and we redeployed some headcount from COGS to R&D as their work transitioned from supporting specific customers to building platform capabilities that will benefit all of our customers.
This adjustment reflects increasing confidence in our margin trajectory as we execute toward our mid and longer term margin targets. We expect services margins in the mid-single digits for the year, with significantly better services margins in the second half of the year. This improvement reflects the successful completion of ongoing arrangements with investments from Guidewire, the ramp of new services hires replacing subcontractors, and the redeployment of some Guidewire services resources from non-billable to billable roles. As a result, we now expect overall gross margins to be just under 52% for the full year. With respect to operating income, we expect an operating loss of between $28 million and $18 million for the fiscal year. We now expect stock-based compensation to be approximately $138 million, representing a 1% growth rate year-over-year.
We expect stock-based compensation expense growth to slow as we temper overall hiring. There is no change to our cash flow from operations expectations. Turning to our outlook for Q2, we expect ARR to finish between $695 million and $700 million, which represents 16% growth at the midpoint on a constant currency basis. We expect total revenue of between $221 million and $226 million. We expect subscription revenue of approximately $83 million and services revenue of approximately $52 million. We expect subscription and support gross margins of approximately 50%, and we expect services margins of approximately negative 2%. We expect an operating income of between negative $4 million and breakeven in Q2. Operator, you can now open the call for questions.
At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. maybe Mike double-clicking on the Connections conference, about a month or so ago. The cloud messaging there was very apparent, and you guys emphasized the plans of getting 100% of that customer base to the cloud over time. I guess, how has the initial feedback been from a customer perspective following that event? How important are those conferences being in person as you think about building out that pipeline progression, with some of those initial reference points?
Hey, Dylan. Thanks for the question. I would say let me take the second half of it first. I think these in-person events are critical for us. There's just nothing that you can do to replace the, you know, the ability to connect with customers and the ability to connect customers with other customers, to be able to hear firsthand their experience, the things to do, the things not to do. That event is just invaluable, just both for us and the community. You know, you add to that the opportunity to connect with the different partners, different application partners, the new fresh innovation that you're seeing in the ecosystem.
It's just great to be able to get people back in person, and we were real excited to like I said on the, you know, in the prepared remarks, set a record in terms of in-person attendance. Really great to see. You know, as I think I was pretty direct, I guess, in terms of our intention to get 100% of the customer base to the cloud. I think, you know, at first people saw that as a sorta more direct statement of that strategy.
I think as it sunk in over maybe two hours or 24 hours, and then certainly over the past few months as we've engaged with customers following the event, I think everybody understands and appreciates why it's important for us to be so clear about, you know, where we're taking the company and where we intend to take 100% of our customers. You know, these implementations and these projects have to last for 20, 30 years. The decision timeframe that people have when they're thinking about how to approach it is not measured in months, it's certainly measured in years. It's not to say that we're gonna abandon anyone. That's not the intention.
I thought it was necessary to be crystal clear that there's just so much more of the innovation, the thrust of the creativity and the physical investment in the product going into cloud, that I really wanted to make sure that every single one of our customers sees that and thinks about it and thinks about how they can take the appropriate steps right now to ensure that they're aligned with that eventual outcome. You know, the initial feedback was a bit of, "Wow, that was interesting that you said that." I quickly got the follow-up that, "Yeah, thank you very much." We actually had one customer who, you know, as I said in the prepared remarks today, we do occasionally sell, even today, even in this quarter, an on-prem deal.
You know, we had a customer, had a long conversation. They had done an on-prem deal previously in the year. You know, they said after Connections and the, you know, my keynote and the sessions that they were able to participate in. They were sitting down to make a more concerted effort about making a plan to get to cloud. You know, it was, you know, I'd say received on the whole very constructively is the summary way to answer your question. Hopefully that helps, and thanks for the question.
Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Great to hear. Maybe piggybacking off of that as well too, I think there was an important implementation in the quarter at Macif and maybe one of the largest ones you guys have done to date, particularly in Europe. Somewhere you guys called out strength from an ARR perspective. I guess wondering, first, how important is that implementation relative to kind of a market validation perspective? Then also driving kind of some nice initial margin leverage here. Maybe how are you thinking about some learnings of moving that complex book of business as some of those other customers are kind of thinking about their own migration roadmaps?
Thanks for that. Thanks for the question about them. You know, one thing I would say is our attitude is every single one of our customer implementations is just as important as every other. I'm 100% committed to ensuring that we're doing everything we can to make sure that every single implementation is a success. You know, this was important. It's funny, like, when I first was talking to the board and talking to Marcus about joining Guidewire, this was one of the most memorable parts of the way that they talked about the company, because of the nature of these projects, we have to make such a huge commitment to ensuring that they are successful. You know, that sounds emotional, but it's really strategic, right?
If you think about what do you want from a core system vendor, you want somebody who's completely committed to ensuring that the project's successful. For them, and for us, if this thing, if these implementations last 20, 30 years, then this is gonna, in the end, be, you know, sort of economically positive for both of us. We are committed to everybody being successful. You know, you talked about Macif. That project's going well. It's critical to us that we have a success in Europe at scale. It's critical to us that we have a success in the market in France. We are very focused on that, just like we are many of our other customers.
I wouldn't call out anything in specific there, but I, you know, it is certainly one of the programs that we pay close attention to. Maybe not so much because we care about it being successful more, but just because it's big and complicated and, you know, requires that level of focus.
Got it. Super helpful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer & Co. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thank you very much. Mike, I wanted to maybe just check in with you on what you're hearing from customers in terms of how they're thinking about macro last quarter, obviously, how, you know, deal composition maybe changed a little bit. Any sense from your conversations with customers on, you know, any incremental caution? What were you hearing from them as far as how they're thinking about core systems and IT budgets?
I would say the answer to that question has not changed over the past few quarters. I'd say that the insurance industry is a very stable industry relative to, you know, maybe the other, I don't know, buying behavior you see from other tech companies that are more horizontally focused. We consider that, you know, to be a sorta, you know, lucky characteristic of Guidewire's focus. You know, that said, there still is the concerns associated with tracking inflation closely and making sure that the system, the rate changes, the claims expense, all those sorts of things are balanced.
You know, there's a, there's a deal that we're working on in the pipeline right now where there's some changes to the operating model associated with inflation that's having an impact on when exactly the Guidewire deal will flow through the system. You know, I wouldn't characterize these things as, you know, macro headwinds, but more just normal course of business in selling core systems to the insurance industry. You know, so summary is it doesn't seem to be helping things, but it isn't hurting things for us. I really feel like our destiny is in our own hands. You know, if we execute effectively and we provide the value that we think we need to provide, we're gonna be able to hit the targets and grow the company based on the forecast that we've laid out.
Got it. Fantastic. Thank you for the context there. Jeff, just one quick one for you. Really nice uptick on that subscription and support gross margin line. How much of that is kinda seasonal? I think typically Q1 does see kind of a bit of an uptick versus actually getting some solid progress on the efficiency front.
Yeah, that's one of the highlights from my perspective of the quarter. I wouldn't categorize it as seasonal. There can be some quarterly fluctuations, but that was a result of some real hard work that we've done over the last year in collaboration with the finance team, the cloud operations team, the product development team to drive much more efficiencies through how we manage our cloud infrastructure. A real positive element there that we've been working on for some period of time. We're still learning a lot in terms of how customers consume our products and what this will look like, but some positive signs there that we all felt really confident in.
As we look ahead, you know, we were able to kind of adjust our target for subscription and support gross margins up, a few percentage points, which was positive as well. Some of that benefit was a result of, as we saw some of the efficiencies of the platform, we were able to repurpose some headcount and move them back into product development, where they were doing more platform-specific work rather than customer-specific work. That also was a benefit that's flowing through our guide as we look for the full year.
Okay, fantastic. Great work, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of William McNamara with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Wanted to just follow up. You mentioned hiring plans and how they've slowed down a bit. Just curious to know if there are certain areas you're, you know, aggressively trying to hire in, to kinda, you know, fill potential like implementation needs, things of that nature?
There's no specific area. You know, the pace of hiring has definitely slowed down. I think that there was a period of time over maybe the last year, I'd say maybe a little bit further out, where we were concerned about attrition. When you're concerned about attrition, you're trying to make sure you get all of the appropriate roles filled. You're, you're really focused on gearing up hiring and recruiting to make sure you can compensate for any attrition that you do see. That didn't materialize as significantly as we thought it might. You know, at this point, there's, we're not really seeing any gaps or strategic gaps or anything like that.
You know, it's just sort of slow and steady approach to managing the company and ensuring that we're making, as Jeff and I have said, a steady improvement on the margins. You know, nothing out of the ordinary.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC. Please proceed with your question.
Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to maybe start out with, you know, coming out of Guidewire Connections, one of the pieces of feedback we got from the partners, is cloud demand is definitely, you know, really strong and customers are very much interested in migrating to the cloud. One of the things that some partners told me that is maybe holding them back is, you know, that they've built so much customization and custom apps on premise, and that makes it harder to kind of migrate to the cloud version. Can you talk to, you know, what kind of steps you can take to make that migration path a little bit more painless? Then I've got a follow-up.
Super question. You know, this is something we spent a lot of time thinking about, obviously. These things end up being super complicated. You know, somewhat the answer to your question is, you know, 1,000 little details. I'll give you, I'll give you some examples. Number 1, you know, I think when we started the journey, we had a sort of view for the types of customizations, the types of configurations, you know, characteristics of the implementation that we thought were acceptable and not acceptable, when those implementations landed on our cloud platform. As we've gained experience, we've been able to hone those requirements.
You know, maybe a lot more of those things that we thought at first were, you know, inappropriate or not something we could support, that maybe they could be things that we could support or support them in certain ways. Sort of that experience enables us to really hone what the requirements are for, you know, things like integrations or customizations that are running on the platform. You know, the other thing that we could do, you know, is facilitate the conversion of those customizations to, you know, something that'll work more effectively on cloud. You know, an example here is, you know, we have something called Advanced Product Designer, which is sort of a new way to build out an insurance product on our, on our platform.
When you use Advanced Product Designer to build out that product on our platform, you just get a whole bunch of features for free, right? We're able to build APIs. We're able to integrate that product into different applications. We're able to make a digital interface for that product much more efficiently. You know, for a customer that's already built their products in the on-prem version of Guidewire, they were looking at having to rebuild that product using Advanced Product Designer.
We built something called APD retrofit, which is a mechanism for us to take most of the product definition that exists on-prem and convert it efficiently to an APD-based product, which enables that customer to more smoothly transition to cloud and take advantage more of the benefits of the cloud version of the product. You know, that's one, you know, example that is relatively important and strategic. You wanna think about lots and lots of these things that relate to the various components of an implementation. Those things will just build and build and build over time, you know, as we get more and more experience and we do more and more of these migration projects. Hopefully that helps give you a little bit of color.
You know, what the partners are telling you is real, you know, that there is a difference between the on-prem implementations and what, you know, we really wanna see and what the customers wanna get out of the cloud implementation. That, you know, I would say is just something that needs to be accounted for in the planning for each one of these migrations.
Got it. No, that's super helpful. Appreciate that example. Then Jeff, just a quick follow-up to, you know, continue on the margin question. Saw continued improvement, you know, on the, on the subscription gross margin side, right? If we do the kind of back of the envelope math above 40% for the first time in a while. Anything just one time to call out? I know you just said not seasonality, but accounting or anything like that. Is there any reason we can't kind of straight line the sort of margin improvement we've been seeing for the past couple quarters and kind of, you know, get it from that glide path from 40% to call it 60% over the next several years? Thanks.
Yeah. Nothing really one time in nature. You know, sometimes it can take a little bit longer for, you know, Q4 is our largest deal, those customers to get provisioned up and running and start using some of the cloud infrastructure resources. If you look at our guide for the year, our guide for the year is consistent with what we delivered in Q1. In terms of kind of one time in nature, nothing in particular to call out. This has just been, you know, a lot of progress that we made over the last 12 months. You may remember it was about a year ago when in Q1 last year, we had a little bit of surprise in some of our cloud infrastructure costs, and we've done a lot of work to get that in a much healthier place.
Yeah, in general, as you look over the longer term, you know, if you look at our long-term models, it is implied that there will be steady progression as we track towards those targets.
Awesome. Really helpful. Thank you so much, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Parker Lane with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Mike, I was hoping you could dive in a little bit more on the decision to use Guidewire on-prem as a stepping stone to the cloud. I think it was three insurers that opted for that during the quarter. Why is that the right approach today? Two, when they talk about the modernization side of it and the eventual migration to cloud, you know, when a customer has made that decision today, are they still thinking about this as a, you know, maybe multiple years down the road, or does it accelerate the timeline, you know, to perhaps the next 12-18 months?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. First of all, I wanna make sure everybody understands that I think that this is a, you know, sort of a positive attribute of the choices we've made about the technical architecture. You know, obviously, in a perfect world, you would want everybody to go straight to cloud. Every single customer is different. The circumstances around their overall enterprise environment, are all very, very unique. There's a lot of different variables that are at play in terms of a customer making this sort of decision. Now, you know, in one case, you could say like a customer has just got the rest of the enterprise all on-prem, Guidewire is on-prem, and they wanna add a core component of the InsuranceSuite to that implementation.
That just makes sense for them to do that modernization on a Guidewire core, but without making the overall leap to cloud. That may be driven by the overall strategy, the overall cloud strategy of that customer. You know, other circumstances, there's can be some regional differences around people's proclivity to accept cloud as a safe and secure place, and we're constantly working on that, and we're constantly making progress. Like I've said a couple times, I mean, these decisions are 20, 30-year decisions.
If we can get ourselves established and we can make sure that the customers are crystal clear about the, you know, the real strategic direction of the company and acknowledge clearly that eventually these implementations will move to our cloud, I see it as a positive characteristic. You know, I'll also refer to you to Vaudoise that we called out in the prepared remarks. You know, this is a customer that made a decision to go on-prem, and in the process of that implementation, made the decision to move to cloud. So this happens, you know.
Even though we are, you know, doing these deals and it probably seems, you know, and even to me sometimes seems like, sort of a bit of a head scratcher, there is real logic behind this, and I do think that it's a positive characteristic of the architecture and the strategy of our company. Especially as you think about Guidewire. You know, I know it's tough sometimes, but if you think about Guidewire over a 10 or a 20-year time horizon, this makes a lot of sense.
Got it. Very helpful feedback. Thanks again.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, thanks for taking the question. Just in terms of capital allocation, I mean, you announced the buyback. You've clearly been active around. Can you just provide us with an update on how you're assessing the trade-offs and uses of cash in the current environment? Just the second part I'll ask upfront. On the free cash flow side, negative for Q1, but you're holding on to the cash flow from operations guide for the fiscal year. Can you just remind us anything we should be mindful of in updating models around seasonality on the free cash flow side? Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On the capital allocation side, we're obviously executing on our $200 million accelerated repurchase program. Once we complete that, which we expect to complete in Q3, we'll revisit the authorization for the other $200 million. We continue to think that where Guidewire is trading today, that there's no greater use of our cash at this point in time than buying back some of our shares. But it's important for us to maintain flexibility to allow for inorganic activities should those arise in this environment. We think that the $400 million share repurchase program that we have authorized allows us to kind of walk that line and do both. We feel that that's the right posture for us. With respect to cash flow, we obviously guide on an annual basis.
There can be a lot of movements on a quarter-to-quarter basis. The results in Q1 were very much in line with our internal expectations and how we thought this year would play out. We slightly adjusted our operating income expectations and that has an impact on cash flow, so slightly more confident into the range. There can be a lot of movements in terms of collections at the end of the year that causes us to provide a somewhat wide range there, no adjustment to how we think about the full year.
Our next question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink with Baird. Please proceed with your question.
Hi. Great. going back to the subscription gross margin topic, given the updated guidance for the year and again the back of the envelope math just on the subscription line, I think it implies an incremental margin pretty close to 60%, and last year was also pretty close to 60%. Obviously, if you just hold those getting improvement over time, but I also think the midterm framework implies reaching a next higher level. What are some of the elements that are going to inflect that? or is it not even necessarily discrete elements but maybe just more a function of how your business evolves over time, you know, given some of the installed base and kind of vintage dynamics you highlighted at the Investor Day?
Yeah. I'm not sure I followed completely your analysis. I'm not sure that I've looked at it the exact same way. In terms of the key levers that we're focused on, you know, you've heard us talk repeatedly about building our cloud operations team in advance of the demand to ensure that every one of these early cloud programs are ultimately successful. This is critical to our long-term strategy. As we think about the build-out of that particular function, you know, we've indicated at Analyst Day that, you know, largely we've built out the team to support $1 billion of ARR, and now we need to grow into that profile without necessarily expanding significantly the existing cloud operations team.
We saw in this quarter, towards the end of this quarter, we were able to repurpose or reallocate heads and employees that were working on customer-specific things and so impacting cost of goods sold. Now they're focused where they were originally focused on building more platform capabilities that will address all of our customers. There's other things like that that we can do, specifically as we continue to march through migrating the customers that went live on Guidewire Cloud Classic to GWCP and recognizing the efficiency uplift associated with that. Those are the things we're focused on. You know, we think we have all the levers in place to execute to the margin targets that we set forth at Analyst Day.
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Michael Funk with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Yeah. Thank you for the questions tonight. I appreciate the earlier comments about the resiliency of your customer base in terms of spending and the earlier comments about the efficiencies that your customers see when they adopt your platform. Maybe just stepping back and, you know, trying to quantify the value proposition that you sell to your clients and, you know, how you quantify that for them in terms of payback and maybe where there are differences in that conversation when talking about, you know, new deployments versus some of the customers are electing to remain on-prem because they have substantial investments in legacy, bespoke systems. That'd be helpful if you could walk us through that math, how you talk to customers about the payback and the value proposition.
Sure thing. I don't know whether or not I'm gonna give you the math behind it. I'll give you the subjective explanation. You know, maybe we could connect later to talk about the math of this in a micro sense. You know, when we, when we do a new deal, as you've, you know, you heard me describe a deal where we're replacing a mainframe system, you know, the, the value proposition associated with that has a lot to do with the risks that the company faces in operating a system that in some cases is, like, greater than 30 years old and has a very small number of people who are able to configure it and support it.
When you talk to these companies, there's not really a math behind that as much as it is just an overall risk calculation that they, that they think about in terms of the ongoing operations of their company. You know, certainly there's a lot of value that an insurance company can gain from just simply being able to create engaging digital experiences on top of core systems for doing things like quoting policies, you know, with agents, with consumers, if it's personal lines or commercial lines. It's like being able to connect with buyers with convenient digital, you know, processing flows, is basically necessary in order to be able to compete in the modern insurance market. We see this all the time.
You know, you could basically do the math of saying, "We're gonna be able to implement Guidewire, create a digital experience, and grow this much. But you can also do the negative math, say that if we don't get up the mainframe system, we don't do a digital experience, we don't create an API to connect into that broker system, we're not going to get any more business at all. You know, you just have to do something in order to connect in a modern way to these new channels. On the claims side, being able to create a efficient claims operation, to be able to manage claims efficiently just has direct benefit to operating expenses at an insurance company.
Tryg is probably one of the best examples in our customer base and maybe the industry of the kinds of impacts that you can gain from really effectively automating claims experiences. You know, these are real structural costs for insurance companies, and you cannot do that on these legacy systems. So that's sort of the category of net new business. That's great. You talk about the Guidewire install base. Some of the Guidewire install base, it's challenging for them to run Guidewire, right? Everybody in the world really is looking at data center expense, IT operations expense. It's just complicated to manage and run these systems, to keep them updated. All this kind of, you know, expense and effort, it doesn't contribute to, you know, the strategic thrust of an organization.
By moving something to cloud, by transferring the burden of IT, of the servers, of the database, of the updates, if you transfer all that to Guidewire, there's an economy of scale that we can deliver to our customer base in managing all of that for them. There is a value proposition there. you know, and then there are a small number of Guidewire customers that are doing this super efficiently. For us, with that cohort of customer, we're really talking about what's the incremental benefits that we're able to add to the application and the platform beyond, you know, these are things that we just can't do in an on-prem modality, but we can do as a cloud service. Those characteristics create value, you know, both in terms of agility, but also operating efficiency for that carrier.
Anyway, without giving you all the numbers of that because it probably changes for each insurance company and each line of business and each sort of segment of the core systems, that's how we, you know, generally think about the overall value proposition for Guidewire Cloud.
No, it's a good overview.
I don't know. Sorry. Does that help you?
It did.
Okay.
I think that's a good overview, thinking about the kind of consistency of the transition of the growth and the drivers relative to other software companies. One more quickly, if I could. As we think about growth this year versus the last couple of years, if you have it top of head, how should we think about the contributions from NRR versus net new? Are you seeing any shift there?
Yeah, I mean, I'd say we've over time built up a pipeline of ARR that flows in from what we call our backlog from ramp deals. you know, that's a pretty meaningful part. We are starting to see some, a bit more new, you know, RFPs or new modernization programs. For a little while, that was sitting on the sidelines because those folks were making the decision to kick the can down the road while they sat on the sidelines and waited for a bit more cloud maturity. We're starting to see that come back to market, which is exciting for us. No material shift in terms of the overall model.
I mean, I think we're still gonna get a lot coming from our install base and our customers, a significant amount coming from deals that we sold in prior periods as those ramps flow through the model. Then, you know, we're always very focused on new modernization programs.
Okay. Thank you for the time. I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
Hello, everyone. I have a quick question on cybersecurity. Does the standardized multitenant nature of Guidewire Cloud allow you to invest more into security compared to some of your peers? I was wondering if you've disclosed any of those investments, in the past, or maybe can give us some examples that highlight your security superiority versus peers.
Yeah. I think the way we think about this is that the centralization of the management of a system facilitates a greater degree of security for that system. That's simply because we can patch Guidewire and the various implementations that are running on Guidewire Cloud more efficiently than we are able to patch and maintain the systems that each of our customers are individually running. You know, your comment about multi-tenancy is sort of exactly right. It's like the changes that we can make once can be applied to many customers. Therefore, the effort that we put in to securing that system can be sort of leveraged by a greater number of customers, a greater number of tenants.
The system overall can be more secure than what any of the individual customers are able to achieve on their own. You know, there's been a few conditions that have come up and, you know, examples of this where we, you know, we were able to ensure that the Guidewire Cloud implementations were quickly, you know, patched for vulnerabilities in a way that it was just a lot more cumbersome for us to get those patches, those updates pushed out to all of the on-prem customers that were impacted by this.
I think in the end, you know, you see this throughout enterprise software is that, you know, these centralized systems just get this benefit of a central focus on security, this sort of idea of a limited number of code lines in order to patch and secure. You just, you know, over time, you create something that's a lot more secure than the variability that exists within all of the individual implementations. This is certainly something that we talk about with our customers, you know, as a benefit of the cloud model and, you know, they understand that.
I think that there's also a degree of, you know, risk that they're thinking about in terms of making sure that we are at least as secure in our approach to managing the system as they are with their individual implementations. Depending, you know, on the size and scope of the customer that we're talking about, that conversation will either be, you know, quick and easy for a small insurance company, you know, where what we can apply with the resources at Guidewire far outstrips what they're able to do on their own. You know, we have, you know, we have some of the largest, most sophisticated customers in the world from an enterprise software perspective. Those conversations are pretty in-depth.
You know, we work very, very closely with those customers to ensure we're creating the most secure, reliable service as we possibly can. I hope that gives you a flavor for how we think about this and why I think it's, you know, certainly a benefit of the model here at Guidewire.
It does. Thank you. All clear.
Okay, great. Thanks a lot.
We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I'll now turn the call back over to Mike Rosenbaum for closing remarks.
I just wanted to say thanks, everybody, for participating on the call today. You know, we're thrilled with the continued momentum in the cloud and new and existing customers. You know, we see that as a great validation of the strategy, and it's given us increasing confidence in the long-term opportunity at Guidewire. Look forward to catching up with everybody throughout the quarter. Thanks very much.
This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
All right. Right on an hour.